As is often the case with misogynists and anti-feminists, the trans horde that took advantage of the “inclusivity” (read: a transwoman helped organize the march, and woe be unto anyone who crosses men who demand access to woman-only space in general) of NYC Dyke March — and others who weren’t even there — don’t seem to have read a word of anything Sheila Jeffreys has actually written. If they had read her, how could it have rationally been said that Jeffreys — a pro-female, pro-lesbian writer — and her work had no place at a lesbian-centered event?

Or, perhaps they read a couple of words, saw something they didn’t like, and threw away the rest? “The rest” being Sheila Jeffreys’s entire life’s work of pro-female, pro-lesbian, PIV-critical radical feminist analysis which spans decades and examines women’s lives from pre-WWI — a body of work from which modern women can draw many parallels, recognize obvious patterns in how women are oppressed by men over time, and call age-old bullshit when we see it, because we are never, ever allowed to see it. Women’s history is routinely erased, and this is a deliberate political strategy to keep women as ignorant of patriarchal context and as oppressed — and as complicit in our own oppression — as possible.

US residents may have noticed the recent War on Women being perpetrated in this country using the excuse of “religious freedom” to justify this rollback of women’s rights.

For the most recent installment of this assault on our rights, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed House Bill 2625, which authorizes employers with religious affiliations to refuse to cover contraception on their employees’ health insurance plans.

States Brewer about the bill:

In its final form, this bill is about nothing more than preserving the religious freedom to which we are all Constitutionally-entitled. Mandating that a religious institution provide a service in direct contradiction with its faith would represent an obvious encroachment upon the 1st Amendment.

The above are just a few of the lies that patriarchal culture has served up for women in the best selling BDSM novel 50 Shades of Grey.

First-time female novelist E L James began the piece as short fan fiction based off of theTwilight series whose main relationship between a 104 year old vampire and a teenage girl meets all the criteria for domestic violence.

Given its source material, it’s not surprising that 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels tells the story of a billionaire who convinces a young woman to agree to be his full time sex slave.

My 1990 book Anticlimax, which has been out of print, is being republished by Spinifex Press this month with a new preface. It is a book of which I am particularly fond because I wrote it in the late 1980s, as a way of making sense of my own experience of the ‘sexual revolution’. The sexual history of the 1960s was being written up in the 1980s as a process of women’s sexual liberation. I did not see it that way.

I did remember that the ‘alternative’ magazines of the period, Oz and International Times, were full of women’s naked bodies, albeit painted with flowers often enough, and promoted pornography as liberating. In the book I had the opportunity to look back at what was really going on, through the sex advice literature and the pornography of the time. I wrote Anticlimax, and my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies (1985/1997), to demonstrate that the ‘sexual revolutions’ of the twentieth century liberated men’s sexual access to women rather than women’s empowerment.

I wrote my new book, Man’s Dominion: the rise of religion and the eclipse of women’s rights, because I was concerned that it had become more and more difficult for feminists within the activist movement and within universities to criticise religion. When I became a feminist in the 1970s it was well recognised that the misogynist ideologies of the three middle-eastern monotheistic religions formed the very foundation of male domination. Religion provided the justification for subordinating women through various versions of the myth about Eve unleashing sin on the world and causing the need for Jesus to die. Religion provided a how-to guide to keeping women down, through rules of modesty, obedience and male headship, and notions of women’s innate disgustingness. These ideas are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The feminist critique of religion seemed unimpeachable to me, when I discovered it in the 1970s, because I had been an atheist since I was 12 years old.

After diving into the complicated depths of female masochism, addressing sadism is like coming up for air. Due to its simplicity. Because a woman should never forget that whatever her personal feelings on the matter, and whether or not she gets off on pain and humiliation, the inescapable truth is that she is with a man who enjoys hurting her.

This may sound obvious. But many women seem to be in complete denial over the fact that men really and truly do want to hurt them; despite the fact that the patriarchal propaganda of porn has now permeated the entire world. Turn on the TV any night of the week, watch almost any movie, and it will invariably involve men hurting women. In a brilliant Orwellian coup, men have somehow managed to convince women that hate is love.

so here we are again. another slutwalk, another sex-positive man organizing it, standing behind women (but not in a creepy way!) and supporting womens god-given right to be sexually penetrated by men. now thats good faux-feminism! and it gets even better than that: this particular dood as recently as earlier today went by the internet handle “molester” on internet forum “formspring”. you know, because sexual assault is funny, and stuff and things. alas, the women who allowed this dood to “help” them pull off slutwalk baltimore probably shouldve done a background check; or at the very least, followed the links he left on his facebook profile, where they wouldve learned about the “molester” thing. oh well! im not blaming the women, really; thats just what happens when you do feminist organizing with men. you have to be super-extra vigilant, and they werent.

new york and washington are among the states to have allowed “therapy dogs” into courtrooms to give comfort to and to gently encourage traumatized witnesses as they testify against their attackers. this dog, rosie, recently sat in the witness box with a 15-year old girl as she testified against her father who had raped and impregnated her. he was convicted, and his lawyers are appealing based on accusations that the dog unfairly swayed the jury, and complaining that there was no way to cross-examine the dog. of course you cant cross-examine a dog, but isnt the issue really this: mens courtrooms and mens legal system as a whole, in requiring victims of sexual assault to testify in court, when sexual assault specifically is known to leave victims literally speechless, is specifically designed to let men who sexually abuse girls and women off the hook?